New synagogue in Munich

MUNICH, Germany — Germany's Jews laid the cornerstone of a synagogue Sunday on the 65th anniversary of a notorious Nazi pogrom, but the hopeful mood was dimmed by a foiled bomb plot and a politician's disparaging remarks about Jews.

The start of construction on a new main synagogue in Munich — the cradle of the Nazi movement in the 1920s — powerfully underscored a Jewish rebirth in Germany that has quickened over the past decade.

Yet the ceremony also evoked emotional memories of the Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when synagogues and Jewish businesses were attacked across Germany, about 100 Jews were killed and thousands were deported to concentration camps in a prelude to the Holocaust.

Charlotte Knobloch, the head of Munich's Jewish community, recalled the fear and helplessness she felt as a 6-year-old girl after someone telephoned her father that day to warn him that "something is brewing against the Jews."

Knobloch survived the Nazi era because a non-Jewish peasant family hid her.

"Since November 9, 1938, a part of me, part of my baggage has been on the run," Knobloch told a ceremony attended by German President Johannes Rau.

"Today, after exactly 65 years, I too have returned fully to my home."

The new $65 million synagogue, Jewish museum and community center will replace one destroyed on Adolf Hitler's orders in June 1938.

Tight police security surrounded the ceremony after authorities in September broke up a neo-Nazi group they say planned to bomb either the future synagogue site or Sunday's ceremony.

Federal prosecutors plan to charge 16 suspects with being members or supporters of a far-right terror organization.

Prosecutors say they have no evidence of a wider neo-Nazi terror network, but the head of Germany's Jewish community voiced alarm at official data showing an increase in far-right crime in recent years.

Paul Spiegel said the bomb plot cast a shadow — "the long shadow of the past that keeps on catching up with us all and our country, and will probably never disappear entirely."

German Jews also were unsettled by an opposition lawmaker, who compared the Jews to the Nazis in a recent speech, citing an allegedly prominent role of Jews in Russia's bloody 1917 communist revolution.

The scandal widened last week when the general leading Germany's elite special forces was fired after his letter of praise to the Christian Democratic lawmaker, Martin Hohmann, became public.

Germany's 500,000 Jews were decimated in the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis. After a revival fed largely by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, about 100,000 Jews now live in Germany once again.